Liane Hentscher/FOXThe future (and finale) is coming.
Fringe, Fox's little sci-fi show that could, is coming to an end. And the show isn't resting on its laurels in its fifth and final season. Reinventing itself yet again, the fifth season will take place entirely in an Observer-ruled 2036 with our beloved fringe team as fugitives out to save the world. Yeah, it's definitely going to be epic.
We chatted with stars Joshua Jackson and Anna Torv at Fox's summer press tour party to talk about Fringe's final season and saying goodbye to the beloved series. And, oh yeah, Josh talks about a possible Mighty Ducks revival. Seriously!
While we're still trying to process that this will be our last season of mind-bending, feel-all-the-feelings TV awesomeness that is Fringe, Josh tells us that he's actually feeling pretty content heading into the homestretch of filming.
"I think the worst case scenario would have been if you get to the end of a season and they just pull the plug on a show and you don't get to finish it up properly. We actually have the benefit of knowing that the show is coming to an end so we can go about finishing it in the right way. There's no sadness yet," he explains. "There will certainly be sadness when we get to the final day and you're saying goodbye to all those people. That will be a difficult goodbye because they have become so much a part of your life over the course of the last five years now. I really feel like we've been given a great gift by Fox here to finish off our story on a strong, strong note."
Anna is also grateful that the show has the ability to go out on its own terms, saying, "I just want everybody to do justice to the show. I want the writers to, the cast to, like everybody. I think that we're walking into this knowing that this is going to be our last season, we're going to get the opportunity to do that."
Josh wasn't able to drop any spoilers about season five—"I would be really upset with myself if I ruined the fun"—but he teases, "I feel like the great unfinished mystery of the show are the observers. And we deal with them now really directly throughout the entire final season and there are a couple of really gee whiz moments that pull from the history of the show as we've already seen it. So there's a couple of those reveals, of the stuff that they've told me, that I think are just awesome. The place that they're trying to take the characters at the end, at least for me, seems like a satisfying and in some ways almost logical, sort of necessary ending for each one of these characters."
Anna also couldn't divulge any season five teases, but when we asked if she hopes Peter and Olivia are going to get a happy ending, she says, "I don't know what they're going to get, but yeah, I hope that!"
At Fringe's panel at Comic-Con in San Diego a few weeks ago, Josh received a blast from the past courtesy of the audience when they started quacking after his classic '90s film The Mighty Ducks was brought up. Since we know Josh is more than game to embrace his past work in a humorous way (Hello, Pacey-Con!), is a possible Quack-Con in his future?
"Maybe, Pacey-Con is done now. I think maybe now we need to do Charlie Conway- Con," he tells us. "I have to say, it has been a good decade of my life since I heard a group of people quack at me, which is an odd experience at the best of times, but that was quite funny at Comic-Con!"
Quack, quack, Mr. Jackson!